TMCnet Feature

Barnes & Noble Now Selling Samsung's First Nook Tablet

Barnes & Noble has teamed up with Samsung to create a nook-branded tablet which is now available for sale. The Galaxy Tab 4 Nook retails for $179, and features a 7-inch 1280 x 800 display screen alongside a collection of reading-focused apps.

The Nook tablets were only produced for approximately one year after their debut in 2012, but now that the company has partnered up with Samsung to cover some of the manufacturering costs, the risk is far lower. Featuring the same basic specs and price tag as Samsung's existing Tab 4 tablet, the heavy focus towards -ebook readers is expected to keep the product relevant among competitors.

One of the Nook's current top competitors is the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire HD sells for $40 less and offers many of the same features, while the improved Fire HDX costs much more, at $229. The cheapest Kindle tablet may be cheaper and offer many of the same functions, one major difference lies in app access. While the Kindle variants are all limited to the apps available on the Amazon store, the Nook has access to the entire google play store. This ultimately makes it the more adaptable device.

The wide range of available apps means that the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook tablet will see use as more than just a device for reading books on, but a wide range of controls allows users to find the exact pages they need to at a moment's notice, and even scan entire books for short lines of text in seconds.

Hopefully, this partnership will breathe some life into the business of Barnes & Noble, as the rise of e-books has made the popularity of paperback and hardcover books decline steadily. While it may seem counter-intuitive for the company to sell the very devices that are making book sales go down, being able to get in on the deal as the e-book market grows could secure the company a place in the future.